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Introduction to Linux - A Hands on Guide

This guide was created as an overview of the Linux Operating System, geared toward new users as an exploration tour and getting started guide, with exercises at the end of each chapter.
For more advanced trainees it can be a desktop reference, and a collection of the base knowledge needed to proceed with system and network administration. This book contains many real life examples derived from the author's experience as a Linux system and network administrator, trainer and consultant. They hope these examples will help you to get a better understanding of the Linux system and that you feel encouraged to try out things on your own.

At times, my wireless card seems to randomly disable itself. The wireless switch is still set to "on", but the light is out, and the "enable wireless" option under the connections icon greyed out. Most of the time it only happens very occasionally. Maybe once or twice a month at most. But it seems to go through other times where it will do it several times over the course of two or three days. It's done it three times today, for example. Restarting usually un-greys the enabling option, but occasionally two restarts are required.

I don't know if it's connected at all, - probably not but just in case, - my (locked) desktop icons keep rearranging themselves into a default alphabetical arrangement. It doesn't happen every time the laptop starts but it still does it a lot. Additionally for a while I've been getting an error message on booting, though the wireless issue predates it:

I Googled it when it first appeared, and saw that it wasn't an essential application, so I've just been closing the alert each time until I have time to look at it in more detail. But I didn't see Nepomuk on my list of installed packages at all.

For the nepomuk thing try disabling or removing the akonadi. The system might not let you remove all related packages without ripping KDE to shreds, hopefully SUSE packages things smarter than fedora and related distros do.

I don't know what the default wireless tool is in SUSE, but if it's networkmanager, try stopping that, install and start wicd to manage wifi and see how that works.

One of my favorite bloggers calls networkmanager the "fifth horseman of the apocalinux" I've had nothing but trouble with it.

I don't seem to have Akonadi installed. I have LibAkonadi4, LibAkonadiProtocolInternals1 and Akonadi-Runtime. But Akonadi is unticked. If they're linked, perhaps that's why it's broken. I'll try installing it and see if that helps. Having just ticked it, I see that the vendor for the already ticked packages has to be changed to resolve dependencies too.

Well ticking it stopped any of my files displaying in either Dolphin or Konqueror. But I went back and uninstalled it, which automatically downgraded the related packages, and this time when I restarted my laptop, there was no Nepomuk error at all. So thanks for that.

I can't see a copy of Wicd packaged for 11.4, though so I thought I'd try ifup, but I'm having trouble configuring it. Does anybody know where there's a newbie-friendly step-by-step guide? I've been Googling and found a few, but it seems to all be for other versions or Distros, and those that I am able to follow don't do what the pages tell me they should do.

Ah that might explain it then. I didn't take it off entirely because I was afraid of not being able to get the other one to connect since it's all manual and I'm not used to it, and then not being able to connect at all to reinstall it. I'm not entirely sure where my ethernet cable is.

Good point; you want to be on a wired network to install (and remove) any wireless related packages.

If something like wicd, wifi radar or the like doesn't work, reinstalling networkmanager might actually fix the original problem. I had one machine that simply wouldn't work with any alternatives, so in desperation I reinstalled networkmanager and found that it now worked as it's supposed to. I've had no problems connecting automatically at many locations with this thing.

In one forum a few people reported the same result. But it did not help to simply uninstall/reinstall networkmanager, ala windows. We all had to try something else in the interim, apparently this would alter something in the settings that networkmanager was failing to do out of the box.